The semantic web is a collaborative movement led by an international standards body to promote common data formats on the World Wide Web. The goal is to provide a framework that allows systems to automatically analyze information from the Internet without (or with minimal) human interaction. The semantic web augments typical World Wide Web information by giving information a well-defined meaning. It provides for the publishing of web information in languages specifically designed to handle and communicate this well-defined meaning, such as Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF Schema (RDFS) extends RDF by class and property hierarchies that enable the creation of ontologies, which are conceptual data models understandable for both humans and computers.
The main organizing principle of RDF is triples in the form of (subject, predicate, object). Typically, schema (which includes the definitions of classes) and instance data (instantiations of those classes) are represented in the same ontology graph. Accordingly, triple stores are used to persist, manage, and query large amounts of RDF triples. Triple stores typically support the SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL), which is a query and data manipulation language for triple stores, providing the ability to retrieve and manipulate data stored in RDF. A problem is encountered, however, in that triple stores have to be obtained, installed, run, and maintained by entities which wish to utilize the semantic web. This requires upfront investment, lifecycle costs, and the expertise of a developer.